Posts tagged police

A good rule of thumb when meeting strangers off of Craigslist is to meet in public places. But you know what's safer than that when your gut's telling you to be extra careful? Meeting in police station lobbies. The Seattle Police Department is encouraging people to use its station lobbies as meetu...

For police officers in the UK, it's time to fight fire with fire. Some sneaky Brits have been using drones to film football matches and smuggle contraband into prisons, so now the long arm of the law is recruiting some unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) of its own. The Sussex and Surrey Police force ...

The US' national law enforcement has been using drones to help nab crooks for almost nine years, but it's still making plenty of rookie mistakes. The Department of Justice's Inspector General has published an audit that shows its agencies not only making poor uses of drones, but wasting a ton of m...

In times past, enterprising football fans who didn't have a ticket for the big match would scale walls or find an elevated vantage point to follow the action. Increased security and the sheer size of modern football stadiums has put an end to such tactics, but some are finding new, and illegal, me...

While Twitter has already simplified reporting abusive tweets, that's not enough if you're facing a very serious threat -- you want something that the police can use to get an arrest or restraining order. Thankfully, Twitter has delivered something that might help. A new email option lets you send...

Apparently it's not just politicians that are concerned about their reputation on Wikipedia -- a report by Capital found evidence of the New York Police Department digging into the crowd-sourced encyclopedia. IP addresses registered to the NYPD have been linked to edits and/or requests to delete t...

A number of states already have laws preventing the police from snooping on your phone's location history without a warrant, but they just got another big boost from a court ruling. A California-based federal judge has determined that cops need those warrants because you have a reasonable expectat...

What's the most effective way to discourage cyber crime across Britain? There's no definitive answer, but the latest tactic seems to be co-ordinating and publicising a concentrated blast of arrests. The UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) revealed today that 57 people have been taken into custody for...

Seattle's officer-worn camera footage is making its way online, but if you were hoping for anything Cops-like you're likely to be disappointed. In accordance with privacy measures, faces aren't the only parts of a shot that are blurred out -- most of the time it's the entire frame, and audio's bee...

Police are unlikely to ever have a Minority Report-like ability to get inside would-be criminals' heads, but they may already have the next-best thing. Developers like PredPol are offering "predictive policing" software that tells cops where and when crimes are likely to happen based on the locati...

The French government now has much more power to silence websites it sees as dangerous. The country has published a decree (in development since July, well before the Charlie Hebdo attack) requiring that internet providers block terrorist- and child pornography-related content within 24 hours of a...

It's easy to forget that Julian Assange is still cooped up inside London's Ecuadorian embassy. The WikiLeaks founder entered the building back in June 2012 to escape extradition and ever since, Metropolitan Police officers have been stationed outside, waiting patiently just in case he ever decides...

In the UK, the simplest way to report a crime has always been to pick up the phone and speak to someone. Whether that's dialling 999, 101 or the Crimestoppers charity, the general process has stayed the same. However, that could soon change in the not-too-distant future. The UK's Home Secretary Th...

When selecting a GPS device there are many factors to consider, like map quality, points-of-interest integration, and if it can help you avoid tickets. That last feature is a big one. According to the Associated Press, Waze, a GPS app that Google bought in 2013, is facing pressure from law enfor...

You may use Google's Waze app primarily to avoid traffic jams and watch out for speed cameras, but some American police see it as a threat -- and they want Google to do something about it. Officers speaking to the Associated Press believe that Waze's police finding feature, which is mainly meant t...

"Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?"...with radars that can "see" through walls. Because according to USA Today, at least 50 law enforcement agencies in the US, including the FBI and the US Marshals, have been stocking up on handheld radars for the past ...

Apple's iCloud had a rough time in 2014, after being implicated in the leaks of a whole bunch of dirty celeb selfies, but it's starting off 2015 on the right foot by helping to nab some iPad thieves in Texas. After stealing an iPad and a number of other pricey items from someone's truck, the dimwi...

Remember those 7,000 body cameras that Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti promised to buy for local police officers this year? Well, now the LAPD has ordered more than 3,000 Tasers that can activate them automatically as soon as the safety is flicked off. The police department has opted for the Taser...

Lizard Squad probably shouldn't have bragged about being impossible to track following its cyberattacks against the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live. According to both The Daily Dot and a Thames Valley Police report, law enforcement arrested alleged group member Vinnie Omari on December 29th -- n...

Many would argue that cops cross the line when they impersonate people on social networks to catch suspects, but that doesn't mean that fake accounts are always off the table. In a recent opinion, New Jersey district judge William Martini contends that police don't need search warrants to create b...